“It’s a selective retirement,” Richard explained, “a retirement from boring shit.”
“I think that’s called a promotion.”
“Well, whatever you call it, I don’t want to ‘drill down’—is that the expression you use?”
“You know perfectly well that it is.”
“Into nasty details of REAMDE’s legal consequences. I mean, we’ve had viruses before, right?”
“We have 281 active viruses as of the last time I checked, which was an hour ago.”
Richard drew breath but C-plus cut him off. “And before you go where you’re going, let me just point out that most of them don’t actually make use of our technology as a payment mechanism. So REAMDE is not just another virus. It presents new issues.”
“Because our servers are actually being used to transfer the booty.”
“Turns out,” Corvallis warned him, “that federal law enforcement types haven’t yet bought into the whole APPIS mind-set, and so they aren’t real big on terms like ‘booty,’ ‘swag,’ ‘hoard,’ ‘treasure,’ or anything that is evocative of a fictitious Medieval Armed Combat scenario. To them, it’s all payments. And since our system uses real money, it’s all—well—real.”
“I always knew that that was going to swing around and bite me in the ass someday,” Richard said. “I just didn’t know how or when.”
“Well, it’s bitten you in the ass lots of times, actually.”
“I know, but each one feels like the first.”
“The creator of the REAMDE virus has made some … interesting choices.”
“Interesting in a way that’s bad for us?” Richard asked. Because this was clearly implied by Corvallis’s tone.
“Well, that depends on whether we want to be the avenging sword of the Justice Department, here, or sort of cop out and say it’s not our problem.”
“Go on.”
“The instructions in the eponymous file just state that the gold pieces are to be left at a particular location in the Torgai Foothills. They do not say that the gold is to be mailed or transferred to any one specific character.”
“Obviously,” Richard said, “because in that case we could just shut down that character’s account.”
“Right. So the way that the virus creator takes possession of the gold is by simply picking it up off the ground where it has been dropped by the victim.”
“Which is something that any character in the game could do.”
“Theoretically,” Corvallis said. “In practice, obviously, you can’t pick the gold up unless you can actually get to that location in the Torgai Foothills. And in order to turn those gold pieces into real-world money, you have to then physically get them out to a town with an M.C.”
“Not ‘physically,’” Richard corrected him. “You guys always make that mistake. It’s a game, remember?”
“Okay, physically in the game world,” Corvallis said, his tone of voice suggesting that Richard was being just a little pedantic. “You know what I mean. Your character has to be capable of surviving the journey from the drop point, through the foothills, to the nearest town or ley line intersection, and to an M.C.”
For, as C-plus didn’t need to explain to Richard, virtual gold pieces in the game could not be converted into real-world cash without the services of a moneychanger—an M.C.—and you couldn’t find those guys just anywhere. For technolegal reasons Richard had forgotten, they had limited the number of moneychangers, inserted some friction and delay into the system.
Richard said, “So the creators of the virus were leveraging their physical control of the—goddamn it!” For Corvallis had gotten a mischievous look on his face and raised an index finger from his steering wheel. Richard corrected himself, “They were leveraging their virtual, in-the-game-world military dominance of that region to create a payment mechanism that would be more difficult for us to shut down.”
“As far as we can tell, they are using as many as a thousand different characters to go into that region and pick up the gold and act as mules.”
“All self-sus, no doubt.”
“You got it.”
“But how are they extracting real money from self-sus accounts?” Because the usual way of turning your pretend gold pieces into real money was to have it show up as a payment to a credit card account.
“Western Union money transfers, through a bank in Taiwan.”
Richard got a blank look.
“It’s an option we added,” Corvallis explained. “Nolan’s always looking for ways to make the system more transparent to Chinese kids who don’t have credit cards.”
“Fine. Where is the drop point?”
“Drop point?”
“Where are the victims depositing the ransom money?”
“Interesting question. Turns out that there’s not just one place for that. The REAMDE files are all a little bit different—apparently they were generated by a script that inserts a different set of coordinates each time. So far we have identified more than three hundred different drop locations that are specified in different versions of the file.”
“You’re telling me the gold is scattered all over the place.”
“Yeah.”
“They anticipated we might make moves to shut them down,” Richard said, “so they spread things out.”
“Apparently. So it’s analogous to a situation in the real world where caches of gold have been scattered all over a rugged wilderness area, hundreds of square kilometers.”
“If that happened in the real world,” Richard said, “the cops would just cordon off the area.”
“And that is exactly what cops of various nationalities are asking us to do in this case,” C-plus said. “Just write a script that will eject or log out every character in the Torgai Foothills and prevent them from logging back in. Then go in there and collect evidence.”
“By ‘go in there’ you just mean run a program that will identify all gold pieces, or piles or containers thereof, in that region.”